S.M. is a Dad?

Paste, a monthly music magazine to which I now subscribe, thanks to my aunt and uncle, had a story recently about Stephen Malkmus, lead singer in the former band that gave this blog its name. It's funny to think he has two children, as the article mentions, considering how detached and disaffected his singing and much of his music always seems to be. When your lyrics include, "Ice, baby, I saw your girlfriend / She was eating her fingers, just another meal," it's hard to picture you pushing a swing, and that one only comes to mind immediately and isn't even as obtuse as they get. (Then again, that lyric was written almost 20 years ago now, and everyone matures.)

I never got into Malkmus' solo career. I bought the self-titled debut -- the one where he looks unnaturally smooth, beautiful and airbrushed on the cover, wearing the "Underdog" T-shirt at a waterside sunset -- when it came out in early 2001 and didn't like it on the first few listens, and then didn't like what I heard of the next couple either. (I haven't heard the new one, "Real Emotional Trash," yet.) But then I listened to the self-titled record a lot recently -- I have a long car commute -- and really started liking it. The jams aren't as jammy as I remembered and the hooks are hookier than I remembered.

The song that really gets me is the penultimate one, "Jenny and the Ess-Dog." (And, boy, do I love YouTube. Note Paul Shaffer rocking on his bald world of keyboards in the middle.) I actually find it quite touching. I doubt that's how Malkmus intended it: As discussed above, he's never struck me as a sentimentalist; some of the details -- the "Volvo with ancient plates," the golden lab with a bandana around its neck, the "awful toe rings" -- are sarcastic stereotypes of the yippie lifestyle; and the weird solo and breakdown seem intended to derail any building emotion. But as cliched as it is, the song is sad, the characters are real: Dating out of your league, living out of your league, remembering what it was like that one summer, wondering if you'll ever hit it out of the park again. Who's unhappier at the end of the song? "The Ess-Dog, Sean if you Wish," waiting tables after selling his guitar? Or Jennifer in 20 years, when she has two kids, lives in suburbia, pours cereal before rushing to her law firm, always recalling in the back of her mind that sticky fake leather in the Volvo and wondering what it would be like to take one more road trip?